I was well on my way there before I got to seminary
I have often pointed out that by the time I had finished my PhD in Biblical Studies at Boston University (1975), I had become an atheist. At that point I had already served as pastor of two Methodist churches. I resigned from the ministry, gave up my ordination, and made the transition to a secular business career. That was indeed a bumpy ride, but I eventually made it in one piece.
Not too long ago, I found in my file the 21-page essay I had written in 1970 as part of the Methodist ordination process—wow, 56 years ago. I’m glad it has survived, because it provides hints of my slide toward non-belief. Yes, in of all places, my ordination essay!
I opened the essay with a mention of the Apollo 8 mission in December 1968, when, via television, millions of humans got their first glimpse of the Earth hanging in space, “…seeing it as a small, finite, and very beautiful globe drifting through the void. Such an experience can be potentially terrifying.”
Hence my second paragraph: “…it must be said in all candor that personal theism, which originated long before Copernicus—let alone Apollo 8—is now passing through a period of crisis, strain, and testing.” I wonder if the church bureaucrat who read my essay was puzzled by this assertion. For a long time—well before 1970—I had been distressed by the implications of astronomy discoveries for theology. I had developed an intense curiosity about space, given that I grew up on the flat northern Indiana prairie—which was flat in all directions to the horizon. My parents bought me a telescope, and I spent many hours gazing at the stars, and even at a few of the planets in our solar system. Thus I wondered: What is out there—and even more important—who is out there?
Despite my religious convictions, my curiosity along these lines continued when I was in college—and into seminary as well. One thing that bothered me especially was that our theology was thoroughly and totally earthbound. Very early on in my seminary career, I wrote an essay about this, not for any course I was taking, but just to try to get my thoughts down on paper, clarified. There might be many hundreds or even thousands of other intelligent civilizations in our Milky Way Galaxy alone—to say nothing of such civilizations in billions of other galaxies.
Yet Christian theologians are so confident of their beliefs about god, developed in total isolation on our very isolated planet. I showed the essay to only one person, a classmate whose primary comment was that I was hung up on astronomy. But this was not the case at all: I was hung up on the realities of the cosmos that astronomy demonstrated. Just how likely was it that there were no other intelligent civilizations out there—which had perhaps been researching and analyzing the cosmos far, far longer than humans had been? Maybe we should be far more cautious in our claims about God until we are able to compare notes with other thinkers in the cosmos.
This thought got some reinforcement one day in a theology class. At that time theologian Karl Barth was all the rage, having spent many years writing a 13-volume work titled, Church Dogmatics. The professor had a sense of humor, and remarked, “Nobody knows 8,000 pages about God—not even in German.”
But my immediate thought was, “How does anyone know even one page about God?”
Go ahead, get out a single page of paper, and write down on it something that you’re sure is true about God. That he is all-powerful, all-knowing, moves in mysterious ways, etc. etc. etc. Now, once you’re made that confident statement, provide the reliable, verifiable, objective evidence/data to prove your point. All the clever theological reasoning we’re so used to doesn’t count—at all.
Another professor one day asked his class, “What is the value of. a 40-day resurrection?” He was referring to the story in Acts 1 that Jesus ascended to heaven. The professor knew very well that this was fantasy. A human being disappearing above the clouds would soon be killed by the lack of oxygen, the intense cold—and radiation. So this fantasy story is a coverup. Jesus never left planet earth; he died again at some point. This qualifies as a New Testament lie. And just how does a resurrected human body, which has to die again at some point, have any bearing on the promise of eternal life?
Later in my ordination essay I wrote this:
“…our blossoming knowledge of the universe—if it is leading some men summarily to dismiss the God-hypothesis—should also encourage us in humility was well. We should be impressed by how much we don’t know…. the men who flaunt their creeds as final statements about God should abandon such arrogance. It just seems elementary to stress this; notwithstanding the vast knowledge which astronomy has thus far discovered about the universe, the conclusion is inescapable that our ignorance must be phenomenal.”
“The study of theology, as it stands in Christian churches, is the study of nothing; it is founded on nothing; it rests on no principles; it proceeds by no authorities; it has no data; it can demonstrate nothing; and it admits of no conclusion.”
Near the end of the essay I condemned the obsession with church buildings:
“The conviction that God must be worshipped publicly has actually acted as a curse in one respect: this one fallacy has led churches to squander huge sums of money on public sanctuaries, and inevitably the human craving for status, grandeur, luxury, and beauty has added enormously to the costs of these superfluous and wasteful structures. The claim that God is being glorified is offensive…”
I should mention as well that I refused to attend daily chapel services at the seminary. Here I was at an institution of higher learning, trying as best I could to discover the realities of the God I had been taught existed, yet the entire student body showed up for worship, to stroke the divine ego. I couldn’t make sense of that. So I stayed away.
Sometimes I’m surprised that the Methodist Church agreed to ordain me.
David Madison was a pastor in the Methodist Church for nine years, and has a PhD in Biblical Studies from Boston University. He is the author of Ten Tough Problems in Christian Thought and Belief: a Minister-Turned-Atheist Shows Why You Should Ditch the Faith, now being reissued in several volumes:
• Guessing About God (2023)
• Ten Things Christians Wish Jesus Hadn’t Taught: And Other Reasons to Question His Words (2021). The Spanish translation of this book is also available.
His YouTube channel is here. At the invitation of John Loftus, he has written for the Debunking Christianity Blog since 2016.
The Cure-for-Christianity Library©, now with more than 500 titles, is here. A brief video explanation of the Library is here.
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